Serve It Up: A Parent's Guide to Kid-Friendly Portions ~ Guest Post & Giveaway

With three little ones, life is busy and it's proving more and more difficult to cook up healthy, home cooked meals every night. I do my best, but there are those times I'm wondering if I'm serving my kids the right foods and portions that their little bodies need to grow and thrive. I always welcome resources that help me make better decisions for my family and their health, which is why I was thankful when introduced to Serve It Up, a first ever book that offers meal plans and ideas for serving kid-friendly foods in a portion-controlled manner.

Here's an interesting and thought-provoking discussion, provided by author Laura De Simone, about the book and the benefits of portion control for children.

Can you feel it? I’m talking about the weight gain that started creeping onto your body last week and hasn’t seemed to have found its way back off yet. It starts with a mini snickers bar Halloween night, and over the next few months it will progress into mashed potatoes and pie overload until suddenly you wake up one day and you’re finding it harder to zip up your favorite jeans! But one thing many parents don’t stop to consider is that their children might possibly be gaining the same winter weight that they are.

It’s no big secret that childhood obesity is a growing problem in our country. It’s estimated by the CDC that 17 percent of children aged 2-17 are obese, and it continues to get worse every year. Being the owner of a fitness and wellness company in Northern Virginia, I learned that many of my parents were ill-informed about nutrition and felt overwhelmed about how to keep their children at an appropriate BMI (Body Mass Index). For example, does your 7 year old sedentary daughter need the same amount of calories as your 12 year old active son? The reality is no, but how much more food does your son need? Many people do not know the answer to this question, or for that matter, where to even begin in making sure children are receiving the calories they need.

I decided it was time to survey parents on what they were actually feeding their kids and then see if I could offer some guidance. What I learned from surveying more than 300 parents was that the same foods kept popping up over and over again, but many parents were clueless on how many calories their kids were actually receiving on a daily basis. What many parents don’t know is every five years, the USDA releases recommended calorie counts that every child should aim to eat daily. These calorie counts are determined by the child’s age, sex and activity level.

I decided to take those foods and write a book called Serve It Up, A Parent’s Guide to Kid-friendly Portions. Serve It Up uses the USDA Nutritional Guidelines and gives you 50 popular, kid-friendly meals and in the appropriate serving sizes.

Serve it Up is now available at Amazon.com and is the first-ever book that offers meal plans and ideas for serving kid-friendly foods in healthy portions. This book is designed to help adults feed their children popular kid foods by pairing foods in appropriate and beneficial ways. The ground-breaking idea is that children will be able to eat the foods they already eat, but do so by placing certain foods together so they are satisfying daily calories, protein, fat and carbohydrate recommendations.

Today, many homes have two working parents and it is harder to provide healthy, home-cooked meals than it was in the past. In addition, some children are reluctant to try new foods, and many parents feel guilty giving into fast and processed foods. I decided it was time to write a book that would look at commonly-served foods and give parents simple suggestions on how to serve those foods properly.

Serve it Up is the perfect book for the parent who does not have time to cook a homemade meal every night, but still wants to make sure their child stays in a healthy BMI range. Serve it Up makes it easy to determine exactly how much food to serve your child.

Please visit our website at www.serveitupfood.com and order your book today!

Sincerely,
Laura DeSimone
serveitupfood@gmail.com



I have had the opportunity to take a look at the book, and feel it's a very valuable resource for parents and caregivers. As a parent it can be difficult to find the time to make a healthy meal every night, or something that all the kids will eat and enjoy. What I like about this book is that it provides helpful meal plans, many of which are those that even the pickiest of eaters will like (including my kids)! As the following examples of a couple of the meal plans in the book show, it also gives you the ingredients as well (you can click the images to enlarge)!

As a busy parent of little ones whose health and well-being is of the utmost importance to me, I am thankful to have been introduced to this book!

Buy It: You can purchase Serve it Up on Amazon.com for $11.99.

Win It: One very lucky reader is going to win a copy of Serve it Up of their own! Simply enter the giveaway below. If you don't see the Rafflecopter form, please click here.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

This giveaway will end 11/21 and is open to the US Only.

**This was a compensated post and the giveaway item was provided for free. However, all opinions are my own and were not influenced in any way.